I am an evil giraffe. Who no longer blogs about politics.

It’s official: the last remaining ostensibly politically viable member of the once-powerful Carnahan dynasty has decided to not seek a third term. I say ‘ostensibly’ because it was actually unclear that Robin Carnahan was ever going to recover from her humiliating shellacking at the hands of Roy Blunt in last year’s MO-SEN race (13 points is pretty bad). And I say ‘last remaining’ because her brother Russ Carnahan is, metaphorically speaking, a dead man walking: the Missouri legislature took the opportunity offered by redistricting to excise Carnahan’s seat in a heroic act of political eugenics.

As you may have guessed from the above, I am not particularly enamored of the Carnahan dynasty. Truth be told, I mistrust any American political dynasty that doesn’t have John Adams as a primary genetic ancestor: frankly, they tend to turn to the bad by the third generation*. So you can imagine that the news that Robin is not going to wait around to be tossed out of office is a pleasant one for me… particularly since it means that Tom Carnahan has a little bit of a patronage problem now for his wind boondoggle business. As in, a little bit of a lack of patronage problem.